Some surrogate biography

When I registered for Perlmonks, now "years ago", I was pretty active with Perl for website development. Not long afterwards I lost interest more
or less due to concentrating more on PHP and XSL(T). We use PHP in a very uninteresting way: only for doing "smart server side includes", based on lots of snipppets that are rendered from XML data and feeds. So my knowledge of PHP is still only basic, but I love XML and all those related technologies like XSLT, XPath, DOM and CSS.

Recently I'm
doing more backend stuff (and thus Perl) again.

Most significant change is that I got interested in Extreme Programming
and improving my OO techniques. That is an interesting area for Perl:
previously I had the impression that Perl's OO implementation was just a
half-hearted hack, piggy-backed on procedural Perl 4, but just now I'm
starting to learn that Perl can even have advantages over pure OO
languages like Java.

What surprised me in a very pleasant way, is that over the last two years
the Perl community has evolved very much. Perlmonks is really on a very
high level generally spoken, and lots of very good tutorials started to
pop-up, like "perltooc".